Window Shoppers Dominated Black Friday

Black Friday retail traffic was up notably from last year, but actual spending stayed flat.

That's the word from retail traffic monitor ShopperTrak, which uses devices in mall stores to count shoppers who walk through the door. According to the company, retail traffic was up 2.2% from last year, but sales rose only 0.3%.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin noted that traffic was up 6% from last year for the first two weeks of the month, as shoppers visited stores for early discounts. Some of those folks apparently decided to avoid the rush on what's traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year.

The early traffic matches trends seen in satellite photos studied by Remote Sensing Metrics, which buys photos from Digital Globe (who also provides satellite imagery for Microsoft's Bing Maps) then counts cars in mall parking lots. According to a report on CNBC parking lots were 35% full in the weeks before Thanksgiving, up from a paltry 31.2% last year.

As far as hot gadgets go, a quick call around to GameStop stores in the San Francisco area yesterday revealed that plenty of Kinects are still available, despite warnings from Microsoft executive Don Mattrick of an imminent sellout. Every clerk I talked to said they had "several" left.

Online did better--research firm Coremetrics said that online sales were up about 16%, with customers doing more "surgical shopping" for bargains, rather than random browsing.